Trees [2010] Freed Of This Flesh

The mysterious Portland ensemble Trees return with their second offering on Crucial Blast, Freed Of This Flesh, with two new fetid death rituals scraped from the crypt. Each of these tracks averages around fourteen minutes, an extended death-rattle formed from black glacial riffs suspended in space, tectonic percussive rumbles, anguished shrieks of torment and abject suffering, deep guttural demon-toad throat singing, and endless sheets of glistening metallic feedback that spill and drift to the far edges of their extreme time-stretched ambient doom, a crumbling, blighted majesty, noxious ambient blackdoom adrift on putrescent tides. The wretched vocal effluvium creeps formlessly across austere slabs of crushing heaviness arranged into ghoulish constructs of atmospheric dread, moving so slow that the music seems to lose all sense of propulsion at times, becoming lost in a fog of howling amplifiers and buzzing feedback, the guitars stretched into massive decomposing drones, the spaces between infested with controlled bursts of drums that skitter and rumble, almost "jazzy" in a vague sort of way, but still incredibly slow and ponderous. Freed Of This Flesh inhabits the same sort of black-tar depths as the likes of Burning Witch, Monarch, Khanate, and Bunkur while stripping the slo-mo heaviness into their own twisted, skeletal configuration.